welcome to my online soul café.

if you’re here, it means you’re curious. this is where i share a little more about the journey that grounds my work.

i’m non-binary, Black, Mexican, queer, disabled, and a lifelong Californian who has spent the last five years calling the Pacific Northwest home. i grew up between northern and central California, on Ohlone and Yokuts lands, in a family and community that taught me early how to navigate complexity, care for people, make something from very little, and keep asking questions when the obvious answers weren’t enough.

those instincts eventually became a career.

over the last decade, i’ve moved through organizing, environmental justice, higher education, nonprofits, philanthropy, research, corporate and service environments, community care, and creative practice. the settings changed, but i kept finding myself doing surprisingly similar things: listening closely, noticing patterns, organizing information, building relationships, translating complexity, and creating structures that helped people move through change.

i became fascinated by what makes a system actually work for the humans inside it—and what people create when the existing system doesn’t.

learning beyond disciplines

my education has never stayed neatly inside one institution or field.

alongside formal education and professional practice, i spent years independently studying and apprenticing across sociology, psychology, medical anthropology, somatics, spirituality, disability, grief, earth-based practices, and different approaches to understanding human behavior.

i wasn't searching for one framework that explained everything. i was collecting questions, methods, practices, and ways of seeing.

eventually, i started building my own.

artistry as a way of knowing

art has been there the entire time.

for years, i made things without thinking of myself as someone with an “arts career.” painting, poetry, photography, journaling, music, gatherings, and creative research were simply ways i processed experience, explored questions, and connected with other people.

after nearly a decade of community gatherings, creative experiments, research projects, journaling tools, and hundreds of paintings and poems, i eventually had the funny realization:

oh. i was already doing the thing.

creativity isn't separate from my research or care practice. it's one of the ways i investigate, translate, experiment, and make meaning.

building the tools i couldn't find

my neurodivergence and experiences navigating chronic pain made me particularly interested in the gaps between what people are supposed to need and what actually helps them live.

so i started making things.

reflection decks. research archives. coaching frameworks. workshops. curricula. gatherings. poems. systems for organizing information. practices for navigating relationships, burnout, creativity, grief, identity, and change.

many began as something i needed, a question someone brought me, or a gap i kept encountering.

over time, those experiments became a body of work.

community is part of the methodology

while i create the work you see here, none of my thinking developed in isolation.

it has been shaped through years of collaboration, friendship, mentorship, teaching, organizing, facilitating, being facilitated, living in community, spending time outside, making mistakes, changing my mind, and learning alongside people whose experiences are different from mine.

i care deeply about capacity, consent, accountability, reciprocity, and boundaries because i believe the way we make something matters just as much as what we make.

what i mean by sovereignty

when i use the word sovereignty, i'm not talking about becoming completely independent from other people.

i'm interested in something much more relational: developing enough connection with ourselves to recognize what we're experiencing, understand what we need, communicate our boundaries, make choices with intention, and remain connected to other people without abandoning ourselves.

sometimes that involves somatics. sometimes research. sometimes conversation, creativity, structure, rest, movement, nature, or simply having better language for what is happening.

there is no single tool for being human.

the toolbox keeps growing

today, my practice includes seven published self-healing and inner-agency decks, original coaching and reflection frameworks, interdisciplinary research, creative work, facilitation, and years of study and experimentation across different systems for understanding ourselves and one another.

some of those systems are academic. some are embodied. some are ancestral. some are creative. some are spiritual.

i'm interested in what becomes possible when we remain curious enough to learn across them without pretending any one of them holds the whole truth.

the earth was here long before us and will remain long after the internet is gone.

in a world full of trends, certainty, judgment, and noise, i'm interested in something quieter:

paying attention. noticing what's real. making room for what changes. creating what we need.

we may not always know why. but we can learn to remain curious so we can recognize what is genuine.

& that's what i'm here for.